Modern desktop user experiences on macOS and mobile platforms have long set a high bar with dynamic fluid glassmorphism, depth shaders, and physics-based inertia. On Linux and Wayland, desktop environments are now entering an era of rich GPU-accelerated compositing.
Liquid Glass (GitHub: ziuus/liquid-glass) is a lightweight, high-performance rendering engine and physics library written in pure Rust, designed to bring real-time liquid glass, chromatic refraction, and fluid spring physics to Linux and Wayland window managers (such as Hyprland, Sway, and custom Smithay-based compositors).
Key Capabilities & Engine Features
- Real-Time Chromatic Dispersion & Refraction: Sub-surface scattering and physically approximated light bending through frosted and curved liquid surfaces.
- Spring-Damper Fluid Inertia: Natural spring physics for gestures, window borders, floating docks, and interactive widgets.
- Zero-Copy Wayland Buffer Passing: Low overhead surface rendering utilizing Vulkan and OpenGL ES compute passes directly onto Wayland subsurfaces.
- Modular Architecture:
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glass-core: Mathematical physics model, spatial geometry, and spring state solvers. -
glass-platform: Wayland wlroots and XDG shell surface attachments. -
glass-ui: Reusable UI primitives with fluid glass styling.
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Building & Running Examples
Clone the repository and run the interactive demo:
git clone https://github.com/ziuus/liquid-glass.git cd liquid-glass cargo run --example fluid_demo --release Explore the project, star the repo, and join the discussion:
https://github.com/ziuus/liquid-glass
